The distinctive role of the university in society is always fragile and always in jeopardy. At its core, that role is primarily extending and deepening human understanding through research, scholarship, and teaching. This report presents an analysis of the following 12 collaborations between Canadian Universities and corporations, donors, and…

Introduction: In this paper we propose a multi-agent Selective Dissemination of Information service to improve the research community's access to digital library resources. The service also provides a new recommendation approach to satisfy researchers' specific information requirements. Method: The service model is developed by jointly applying…

This paper has been prompted by the challenges created by recent proposed reforms to social care services in the UK services which are being "modernised", a term ubiquitous in policy documents but difficult to define with confidence. Government modernisation and e-government programmes highlight with renewed urgency the need for social…

Explores the ways in which librarians keep up to date through the use of professional literature. Several current awareness services--bulletins, newsletters, table of contents services, bibliographies, and book reviews--are described, and the role of the popular library press is discussed. It is concluded that a more coherent current awareness…

This paper describes the evaluation of a current awareness or selective dissemination of information (SDI) service at New Mexico State University. To provide expanded library services to faculty, a current awareness service was offered to 18 science departments in 1991. A profile for each researcher enrolled was entered into a program and was run…

Library staff at Louisiana State University Medical Center in Shreveport have written two computer programs automating much of its selective dissemination of information (SDI) postprocessing. The software sorts SDI results, gathers and reports statistical data without requiring manual data entry, allows delivery of search results as hard copy or…

Describes push technology, which supplies automatic newsfeeds to users from a select group of Internet and intranet news, information, and software resources. Highlights include similarities to selective dissemination of information, intranet management, and addresses of some push technology sites on the World Wide Web. (LRW)

This essay reviews current policy issues regarding statewide educational databases. It begins by defining the major characteristics of a database and raising two questions: (1) Is it really necessary to have a statewide educational database? (2) What is the primary rationale for creating one? The limitations of databases in formulating educational…

This report describes a prototype current awareness service that was conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Stout from fall 1984 through 1985 and involved the selective dissemination of information through the use of online bibliographic databases and the routing of tables of contents from selected periodical holdings. A discussion of the…

One way a business can meet the challenge of gathering information from different sources and platforms is to develop a news filtering and integration system. Topics include creation of a planning team; identification of user requirements; considerations of infrastructure, primarily system compatibility; and the process of analyzing, evaluating,…

Six articles address issues of censorship and sexuality in libraries. Highlights include: surveys of censorship in North Carolina, acceptable use policies for the Internet, perceptions of librarians' sexuality, the proprietary nature of corporate library holdings, contemporary views and interpretation of First Amendment rights, and collection…

In response to rapidly escalating survey response requests from publishers of college guides and magazine rating features, institutional researchers at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) developed a standard response form. In fact, the extensive research and level of detail that many surveys request require significant effort…

Describes the development of the Online Contents Service at Tilburg University (Netherlands) that provides users with desktop microcomputer access to the contents of journals held at the university. The rationale, procedures, retrieval software, subject search capability, and future developments are discussed. (five references) (EA)

Technological developments such as groupware and World Wide Web technology have opened up new opportunities for the delivery of information directly to the end-user's desktop. These advances have meant that suppliers are now producing a new breed of current awareness services (CAS), termed alerting services, which automatically filter newswires…

This paper reports on an Old Dominion University (Virginia) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Langley Research Center project, NCSTRL+, a unified, canonical digital library (DL) for educational, scientific, and technical information (STI). NCSTRL+ is based on the Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library (NCSTRL),…